


flower honey

by steepedinwords



Series: we move lightly [5]
Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Beekeeping, Flowers, Friendship, Gen, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-20
Updated: 2018-01-20
Packaged: 2019-03-07 01:15:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13423623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/steepedinwords/pseuds/steepedinwords
Summary: Jenny enjoys a chat in the shade with Granny Evelyn.





	flower honey

**Author's Note:**

> I know almost nothing about beekeeping, please don't yell at me.

“You look tired, dear. Come sit here in the shade.”

Jenny looks up at the sound of Granny Evelyn’s gentle voice. The old woman is seated on a folding chair under one of the still-flowering cherry trees lining the edge of the town square. There are petals falling gently all around her, in her hair and onto the grass, the last remnants of spring giving way to the oppressive heat of midsummer. She smiles up at Jenny, whose tired feet seem to carry her over to the shade of their own accord. Jenny folds up gratefully cross-legged on the flower-sprinkled grass beside Evelyn’s chair. The grass prickles her bare thighs below her cutoff denim shorts, but it’s blissfully cool here after hours in the sun. She’s been out at the docks with Willy all morning, fishing. She only caught three fish, but Willy is proud of her progress. Her eyes still ache with the glare of sunshine on the waves, and her arms ache, but she’s got some decent fish wrapped in plastic in her pack, and she’s looking forward to figuring out how to fry them for dinner in her new kitchen. Willy took care of the gutting for her while she made him a batch of Linus’ special bait, in trade. Cleaning fish makes her queasy. But, fish for dinner! Leah’s not coming over tonight, since she’s hard at work on a project, so she won’t be bothered by the smell in the cabin. Jenny can almost taste the breaded mullet already, hot and spiced with cayenne.

“Thanks,” she says belatedly, looking up at Evelyn. “For asking me to sit with you.”

Evelyn pauses in her work. She’s knotting thin hemp into a crisscross pattern, wearing gloves to protect her hands. She leans over and pats Jenny on the head, ruffling her curls as if Jenny’s a small child. “You looked like you could use a rest. Willy was by earlier, he said you’re coming along nicely in the fishing department.” She prods the silvery-red tail of a fish poking out of Jenny’s pack with her foot and goes back to her knotwork. “I never could get the hang of fishing myself when I was younger. I just stick to making the old fellow his nets.” She holds up her handiwork and Jenny realises that’s what it is. The net is beautifully made, Evelyn’s old hands surprisingly dexterous as she pulls knot after knot tight. She grins. “Willy’s very bad at this part, you see.”

Jenny grins with her, and they lapse back into comfortable silence. She doesn’t feel shy around Granny Evelyn any more, not after all the times the old lady has invited her in for tea and cookies and stories about the town and its inhabitants.

“Con - your Papa - always used to buy my nets too. And Willy’s husband, before he passed,” Evelyn says reminiscently now. “Con was a prime fisherman, always kept the town well-stocked. Sailed out with Willy and Jim in the winters, too. They’d bring me back seashells. You must get that from him, the way you give presents to everyone. George and I did enjoy that mayonnaise you brought over last week." 

Jenny ducks her head. “I like giving people things. I like having things to give.” Back in the city, she’d always wished she could be more generous to the people she lived with. She had to settle for making dinner for the aunties, or cleaning the apartment. Having fresh food and flowers to spare, the give away to her new friends, was a novel and delightful experience. She’s discovered that Haley adores sunflowers, and Emily loved the odd purple crystals Jenny found in the mine a few weeks ago.

“Well, dear, if you don’t mind running over to my house for a moment, I did brew some iced tea. Sweetened with your farm honey. We bought some at Pierre’s Sunday, and I just love a good pitcher of sun-steeped tea. Would you get it for us?”

Jenny heaves herself to her feet, brushing grass off her legs, and sets off to George and Evelyn’s house. The door isn’t locked, of course, and she lets herself in to the cool darkened entryway. 

“Hello?” she calls.

George grunts a greeting back from the living room, where the TV screen is flickering. He has a blanket over his lap despite the hot weather outside. He nods to her as she comes in sight, and turns his attention back to the screen.

The kitchen light is on, and someone’s whistling. Alex, Jenny realises as she comes around the corner. He’s standing at the sink, letterman jacket taken off for once and slung over a chair, and he’s elbow deep in an excessive amount of soapsuds, washing dishes industriously. 

She clears her throat once, then again when he doesn’t seem to hear. He’s still got his back turned, and when he starts whistling again, a little off-tune, Jenny suddenly realises he’s wearing headphones. Feeling like an intruder, she walks over and taps him on the shoulder. Alex jumps. His whistling stops abruptly as he turns, surprise all over his face. He pushes down his headphones and grins at Jenny, though, almost immediately all cocky confidence again. “Hey, farm girl!”

She smiles back tentatively. Sometimes Alex’s cockiness is irritating, but today it seems charming, combined as it is with the sight of him cheerfully doing housework for his grandparents. “Hi… sports boy.” It’s not a great response, but she’s never been very good at banter. “Evelyn sent me for iced tea?”

“Oh yeah! In the fridge,” he says, pointing with a soapy hand as if she might miss the big refrigerator two steps away. “Hot out today, huh?”

She nods, grabbing the heavy stoneware pitcher. “Um. Do you have glasses?”

“Nope, I’ve always been able to see just fine,” he says, deadpan but with a sparkle in his eyes. Jenny sighs and raises an eyebrow. “Ohhhh, for drinking out of. One sec.” He rinses the suds off a pair of cups in the sink, dries them on the tea towel hanging over his shoulder, and offers them to her. “There ya go. Have a good time with my granny, now.”

“Thanks,” she says shyly. She heads back to Evelyn, turning over this new bit of information in her head. Alex, apparently the consummately self-involved jock, does housework for other people. Good to know he’s not as much of a jerk as he can sometimes come across.

Evelyn takes the drink Jenny pours for her. “Thank you, dear. I always think iced tea is better with honey than with sugar.” She gives Jenny a considering look over the rim of her glass. “Clover honey, hmm?”

Jenny nods, sipping from her own glass. Condensation is already making it slippery under her fingers. “I read that trying other flowers can result in different flavours, but I haven’t tried that yet.” She’d built and set up her four bee houses a month or two ago with Robin’s help and much advice from Lewis and the books Gunther had found for her. They’re in the field of wild clover close to the ranch. The honey she’d brought to Pierre’s was her very first harvest, scooped carefully from the detachable peaks of the bee houses so as not to destroy the honeycombs below. She still has a few stings to show for it, but Leah showed her where to find wild plantain leaves for a salve, so they don’t hurt any more.

“I like peonies, myself,” Evelyn confides. 

“Sorry?”

“Peony honey. Have you found Con’s peony beds yet?”

Jenny shakes her head, surprised. “Where were they?”

“On the east side, below the greenhouse. Did it really get that bad over there?”

“It’s still quite overgrown,” Jenny admits. She hasn’t cleared all her land yet, reluctant to destroy too many of the saplings that have sprung up in the last decade or two. Some of her farming books warned her about soil erosion, and it sounds pretty bad. There have been huge dust storms and drought for years from people clearing too much land and growing the wrong sort of crops, and she doesn’t want to contribute to another one. So she’s cut down enough to find the old orchard and make space for crops, but that’s it.

Evelyn sighs. “Con certainly had a way with peonies. I never could get mine to bloom quite as well as his. Every year at the Flower Festival, we’d bring over armloads of flowers to decorate the clearing, and it turned into quite a competition. Beautiful peonies. If anyone had really been judging, he would always have won.”

Jenny grins. “Sounds like fun. Though if _I _tried to compete with you, I’d definitely lose.” She sees the fruits of Evelyn’s hard work throughout town nearly every day. Bright flowers and greenery spilling from the hand-crafted and painted ceramic pots Emily made. And now that it’s summer, around every corner is another brilliant explosion of colour, or a cool green vine climbing its way up the stonework of a building, or a flowering tree like the one they’re sitting under, or a beautifully manicured hedge.__

__“It’s past the season for peonies, but I could show you where they are sometime,” Evelyn offers, looking pleased. “The plants’ll be nearly as old as I am, but they survive for more than a century sometimes. And next year, you could bring them to the festivals again…”_ _

__Granny Evelyn trails off, sounding a little wistful, and looks at Jenny hopefully. And Jenny smiles back, accepting the offer for what it is: advice, and a lifetime’s worth of expertise, and an invitation, to fit into this community someday, the way Papa had._ _

__The tea is sweet and cold, and maybe next year the honey will taste even more like home._ _


End file.
